Discourse

[Ravenfreak]

I'm surprised we don't have a topic for this software yet! There's lots of communities that are powered by Discourse these days, even the official Unity forums is powered by Discourse. You can either pay for hosting if you don't want to set everything up yourself or go with self hosting, however you'll need VPS hosting and not shared hosting because Discourse relies on Docker which can only be installed on VPS hosting. I'm still slowly in the process of moving one of my forums from phpBB over to Discourse. It was pretty easy to install, but I do have some Linux knowledge. Are you using this software for your community? Have you joined a forum using this software?

Discourse is the place to build civilized communities

Discourse is modern forum software for meaningful discussions, support, and teamwork that gives your online community everything it needs in one place.

www.discourse.org

 

[TPerry]

Yes, I am using Discourse on one of my sites. For a forum only based site, I really am growing to like it. In many aspects it is better than the paid software (Xenforo) that I use on my main site. It has features that have been asked for by Xenforo paid license holders for years (and ignored by the developers) and is also much better on mobile than the offerings of many other paid script providers.
As you mentioned, if you are going to self host then you are going to need a VPS or dedicated server. A small 2vCPU 4GB VPS will be more than adequate in most cases. My current discourse site runs on a Contabo 4vCPU/4GB ram/200GB SSD instance that I pay around $7USD a month for. Of course, my mail for the site is hosted on my mail server I also run and not on the Discourse site itself, so you need to figure in how/where you are going to to transactional email from. At one time using a Gmail account was easy, but most of the free email providers are making it harder to use them now in an automated process like this unless you are on their paid tier.

 

[TPerry]

One note for those that are getting into using Discourse. Updating via the ACP is not the only thing you need to do. At least once every two months I recommend logging into your server instance via SSH and rebuilding from the CLI after running your OS updates.
Sometimes the ACP update will not complete until other resources are updated that are not handled by the ACP upgrade.